Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley are celebrated for video works featuring a distinctively graphic black-and-white palette and scripted narratives in rhyming verse full of punning wordplay by characters brought to life onscreen by Mary. Centered around two new film works—Blood Moon and I’m Jackson Pollock—the exhibition explores the mechanics of power and its fallibility, each film presented in an immersive world and experienced through a darkly funny lens.
In this world they have created, Mary and Patrick explore the nature of human relations in films where all of the characters have pumpkin heads—an ironically comedic twist that belies the violence of this imagined world in films grappling with the complexities and limits of desire. The first film of the exhibition, Blood Moon, explores interpersonal relationships in a scene inspired by Lennie and Curley’s wife from John Steinbeck’s seminal 1937 novella, Of Mice and Men. What initially appears as a tender exchange between new lovers takes a turn for the tragic and results in the gruesome yet comic end for our protagonists. The second, a monologue work titled I’m Jackson Pollock, brings to life the bombastic character embodiment of societal power, callowly hurling boastful claims in rhyming verse. The immersive installation is populated with props, sculptures, and projections that fill the world developed by the artists.
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